Paying it Forward

Paying it Forward. As long as I can remember there have always been kind souls. Whenever you thought you couldn't take it anymore, someone was there to ease your burden. I don't believe life could go on for some without the help from strangers. Not only does human life benefit but so does nature.

Even before you or I were born, act of kindness were being initiated. Who knew that a white man or woman would help a slave escape his master or let them hide on their property, knowing that the penalty would be death? What about the people who said enough, no more killing Indians and treating them like animals. Or the ones the stood up and said that they could not allow this crazy mad man to continue persecuting the Jewish people. If it wasn't for these kind strangers we would still be back in those days. We would never have heard of Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, Sequoya, or Tatanka Yotanka (sitting bull), because more than likely they would have never been born.

Fast forward to now, today. You hear it in the news, from your friends or you read about it in the paper. Someone somewhere has pulled a child from a burning car or stopped a lost soul from committing suicide. Perhaps they saved someone's life by giving CPR. There is a person out there on life support already pronounced dead by their doctor, waiting only to donate their organs to somebody so that they might live. Whose knows how many lives may be saved from just one donor?

Paying it forward does not have to be about saving a persons life. It could be something as simple as planting a tree or buying groceries for a family doing without. It could be by helping the environment.

How can paying it forward help in the future? Take those same people whose lives were saved. We know what the leaders in our past have done to pay it forward but what about the child pulled from the burning car. Maybe he or she will become a teacher, a doctor, or a bus driver. Maybe they will plant a tree and encourage others to do so also. Will they be the one to help end the wars that have been raging for decades? He or she might be the person who finds a cure for a disease or an alternative form of fuel. People have been paying it forward since the beginning of time and we are benefiting from those acts of kindness today. We will continue to reap those benefits in the future. How will you pay it forward?